I'm sorry I've been away awhile. I've been making new oil paintings and pastels to take artwork on the road again. When I am on an art roll I hardly ever want to leave the studio.
However, I have been keeping up on what is called the Gun Debate. This is more than just a battle of wills over whether guns and gun manufacturers can be held as responsible as any other possessor of dangerous items as cars, homes, and prescription drugs.
We are really fighting over what kind of future our present tiny tots are going to inhabit in more ways than just legislatively. This is a battle over the state of our newest generations minds and hearts. Either our youngest will be able carry this century forward to a true planetary plateau, or will we be divided into the only two classes the gun idolators recognize, Shooters and Targets?
For the gun idolators, nothing would be better for their arrogance, profits, and power than to persuade America that the only way to raise a child is to turn this country into one enormous paramilitary camp. Arming teachers with guns is just the first step. Schools are not the only places youngsters congregate. I suppose we'd have to arm every doctor and intern in every pediatric clinic and children's hospital in the country. How about X-ray machines to search every person that wants to take their child to the playground? Will every summer camp and family campground now have to be surrounded by barbed wire? How about a 24/7 SWAT team detachment inside every Chuck-E-Cheese in the country? Don't forget to plan your taxpayer supported armed guard for all your weddings, graduations, bar and bat mitzvahs, baptisms, and July 4 holiday picnics.
This is not possible! No one can be on guard every second of every day. This will send our tots into insanity even earlier than we're doing right now. Children are not STUPID. Children are also highly sensitive to what is going on around them. The only effect of giving every teacher a gun is to breed nightmares into millions of kids that "Teacher will shoot me if I get the answer wrong". Also, someone somewhere will say "Hey, let's swipe the teacher's gun and scare the principal with it", to be follwed by a breaking news item "Principal Under Suicide Watch after Shooting Own Pupils in Self-Defense.)
I think adults can be that stupid.
I think the rabid gun worshippers actually want this culture of fear from cradle to grave. That is beacuse their reactionary, survivalist, mindlessly violence-glamorising life, to be valid any longer, must have the weaponry to enforce this over the youngest generation of Targets...I mean children. This has to begin with a child's earliest memory of who their first living President was.
The first President of the United States I recall was Lyndon Johnson. I was six years old when I started asking why President Johnson just couldn't say the Vietnam War was over and that's it. Whatever his weaknesses were, no matter how cocooned the family tried to hold me, awareness of Civil Rights, and particularly Women's Lib, are an integral part of my earliest memories. I hope this has made me a Baby Boomer with a Clue roday.
Who is going to be the first living President that today's six and seven year olds will carry in their minds into the mid-21st century? A multi-ethnic son of a recent immigrant, raised by a single mom who started out working in the projects, belongs to no "American blue-bloods" and who is a man who still admits that he is still leaning! We can work with a man who can still learn. Congress is full of idiots who think they know it all.
Perhaps when these six and seven year olds become fifty-six -and-seven years old, may will wonder why we did not know what we had when we had him.
How can the reactionaries possibly think they can erase President Obama from the history books and the minds of our emerging youngest? A lot of black history was hidden for a long time, but an eight-year Presidency?
There is only one way to do it, and that is with the threat of blowing everyone's brains out if we all don't conform. It's a last desparate gambit to prevent the future.
Of course, a society of Shooters and Targets will be crippled when it comes to real learning and progress, which can happen only if we can truly trust the neighbors and the strangers around us not to be blood-lusting killers. If Issac Newton had to worry about snipers every time he sat in an apple orchard to ket his mind wander, we still wouldn't have gravity. We'll all become either arrogant sadists or grovelling trolls instead.
What kind of "society" is that?
This is what we are fighting for; the freedom of our tot's minds.
I said i have ben doing a lot of painting. Right now, I am painting a little portarit of a three year old who got shot waiting for his first haircut. I ahve a challenge to all the artists out there.
How about a Gun Victim's Memorial Quilt? I will have my offering ready as soon as possible. Let the nation see the diverse faces and then let the gun worshippers explain why their deaths had to be neccessary.